My Intel i7-3930 LGA 2011 build is in its 8th year of (damn near close to continuous) operation, and starting to see some serious slow-downs. Photo-editing is taking way too much time, and so I've decided to pull the trigger with a new build.
It will be built around the AMD Ryzen, either
Ryzen 7 3800x or the
Ryzen 9 3900x. Primary use will be photo-editing in Lightroom and Photoshop, and some light video-editing.
I haven't done a build since that LGA 2011, so I'm a little rusty on some of these things and need some advice. I definitely want to stick with an ASUS board, 64GB of RAM (minimum), and a Corsair all-in-one fluid cooler.
• As for power supplies, exact mobo model, exact RAM models, and case -- I'm a bit lost. HELP!

• GPU must be able to support 3 high-resolution monitors.
• Win10 will be the OS.
Any thoughts/advice/suggestions?
It would help to know your budget. I was primarily an Intel guy who recently made the switch to Team Red. Came from a quad-core i5-7600K on 16GB of Ram and an 8GB GTX 1080 to:
Ryzen 9 3900XT 12-core
32GB DDR3200 (2x16GB)
RTX 3070 8GB graphics
It was a HUGE improvement in my video editing and I noticed much smoother gameplay in Call of Duty Warzone as well.
I wound up buying the most expensive motherboard I ever have because it had ALL solid reviews while most everything else I looked at had mixed reviews, here's what I got:
ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Impact AM4 Mini DTX AMD Motherboard - Newegg.com
Alternatively, I also have a media PC we have hooked to our tv that we use to watch shows off of and it's using this mobo:
MSI PRO X570-A PRO AM4 ATX AMD Motherboard - Newegg.com
And for my wifes new build got her this:
ASRock B550M PRO4 AM4 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Newegg.com
I haven't had issues with any of them, although the new builds for my wife and myself are only a few weeks old so YMMV
The cooler I'm using on my 3900XT is this:
Corsair Hydro Series, H100i RGB Platinum SE, 240mm Radiator - Newegg.com
For power supplies I'm also a fan of EVGA. Make sure you get one of their fully modular models (this means you can decide which cords to plug in, so you have less cables to manage). You can use the site PCPartPicker.com to plug in all your components and it should tell you about possible compatability issues plus your total power needs.
The GPU is going to be tough right now, there's new products out, but demand is through the roof and supply not so much, so it's difficult snagging the newer stuff as it is gone within literally a second of launching on most sites. And older used cards are selling at inflated prices because of this as well.
Also highly recommend the new M.2 SSD's. They are stupid fast over the older hard drives, they look similar to a stick of ram, and slot and then screw into your motherboard typically under or near the graphics card slot. They require no cables to plug into them, so they help improve case airflow, provide you a lot more speed and are just a great technology all around.
Be aware that Ryzen for me was a step back from the simplicity of Intel in some ways. Intel was more of a set it and forget-it with most settings. Ryzen is VERY touchy about the RAM you use. I've read the 3000 series pairs best with anything between 3200-3600 speed RAM. But make sure you check your motherboards QVL to see which RAM is tested to work on their boards, as some can be finicky. On my new build my RAM is 3200 speed but defaulted to 2133mhz and when I activated DOCP in the BIOS (which is the Asus version of XMP that you'll find on other boards) to automatically set the RAM speed and timings, it refused to post. Turns out one of my two RAM sticks from Corsair was bad, and wouldn't post at anything beyond 2133mhz so I had to return it for a replacement.
I have THREE of the new Ryzen 5800X 8-core 16-thread CPU's in hand, but they retail for $450 plus tax and generally aren't as good a value as the $550 Ryzen 5900X 12-core (but I wasn't able to find any of those). I haven't been able to sell any of the 5800X CPU's and have a couple weeks left to return them which I'll be doing if no one wants them.
If you do want one, I won't gouge you on the price or anything, but be aware you may need to do a BIOS flash on your motherboard before it'll recognize this new generation of CPU, so you'll want a motherboard that allows you to flash it without a CPU in the board (some models have this feature)
I also have an EVGA RTX 3070 8GB card on the way if you're looking, will have it in hand in about a week. Any questions let me know, and welcome to the Ryzen Master Race!
